How to make the most of TripAdvisor
To make the most of TripAdvisor, you need to know how to navigate an increasingly complex and unintuitive platform
Few online resources have achieved the blend of fame, notoriety and dependence TripAdvisor has accomplished since it launched over 25 years ago.
Back in 2000, the internet was still taking shape, and TripAdvisor was initially designed to be a business platform where hoteliers could respond to consumer reviews.
It didn’t take long for that business model to be reversed, with decades of ongoing development creating a platform which today increasingly feels complex and unfocused.
Between an unintuitive interface, numerous fake reviews and a focus on everything from AI-generated holiday itineraries to car hire, it’s not always easy to make the most of TripAdvisor.
These are some of the things to bear in mind before using this uniquely comprehensive online travel resource.
The price is right
Arrive on TripAdvisor without logging in, and you’ll be presented with a literal and metaphorical world of information.
It’s useful being able to specify whether a hotel has free WiFi, or whether a restaurant needs to offer chicken dishes, but the sheer wealth of options often feels overwhelming.
Navigation across the site is inconsistent. Scroll down the homepage, and the five Search categories morph into eight sections within a header bar.
Searching for hotels doesn’t bring up a list of venues. Instead, it presents a calendar of the next two months with Cheaper, Average and Higher prices marked against each date.
This calendar obscures the top row of results, and it moves around as you attempt to scroll down the page unless you left-click at either side of the screen to banish it.
The aforementioned top row of results is described as Traveller’s Choice, yet many of these resorts aren’t actually highly regarded by reviewers.
Scroll down to the “Find the right hotel for you” tab and you’ll find hotels ranked not by rating, but by the nebulous concept of Best Value.
This uses a proprietary algorithm involving everything from your list of previously viewed hotels through to venue-supplied availability. Value is only one part of the equation.
TripAdvisor feels more like a booking website than a review platform, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider travel brand Expedia bought it in 2004.
In turn, TripAdvisor purchased tour and activity provider Viator in 2013, before adding an Instant Booking feature. Much of its revenue now comes through affiliate marketing.
Tips and advice
Even if you order venues by Traveller Ranked, they don’t necessarily appear in a logical order, with 3/5-rated venues appearing above 4/5 and the latter above 4.5/5 destinations.
Our first piece of advice on how to make the most of TripAdvisor is therefore to ignore rankings and focus on specific reviews.
Our next piece of advice is to point out those reviews can be bogus, biased or misleading.
By its own figures, TripAdvisor rejected or deleted 2.7 million reviews last year, up from 2023’s previous record of two million.
Over half of these fake reviews involved businesses (or their affiliates) posting false positive reviews to elevate their own rankings.
Reading reviews is a more dependable guide to a venue than glancing at star ratings, but it’s often advisable to skate over five-star reviews, especially breathlessly positive ones.
More balanced assessments tend to come amid two, three and four-star reviews, where people have addressed positives and negatives.
If a reviewer has only made one or two contributions to TripAdvisor, this may be evidence of self-promotion – or someone with an axe to grind.
Photos are harder to fake than reviews, so look through traveller photos (rather than resort-provided marketing images) to judge elements like food, cleanliness and aesthetics.
Historic reviews often date quickly, especially in terms of hotels and restaurants, where new ownership or refurbishments could eradicate previous reasons for complaint.
Equally, writing your own reviews requires acknowledging extenuating circumstances, being honest about your experience and (occasionally) answering questions from other users.
The TripAdvisor forum is a valuable resource, with 415,000 topics covering the UK alone. It’s less likely to attract AI bots or spammers than Reviews, but don’t take comments as gospel.
